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Novella Salon NOVELLA SALON MARCH 19, 2018 1 NOVELLA OPENING Crybaby in Love For my seventh birthday I asked my parents for a Gameboy. We lived in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire, and during the summers swarms of mosquitos that bred in our community pools and ponds reserved playing outside as an activity for the fearless or idiotic. I had never asked for a toy as expensive as a Gameboy before, because my mom stayed home to play with me instead of having a job, and I didn’t want her to think she wasn’t enough for me when I was enough for her. But the delight in reading old library books to her inevitably faded, and at school during lunch all the kids would crowd around their Gameboys playing with each other, a club I desperately wanted to join. A week before my birthday, while my parents were out playing ping-pong at the church, I moved a chair around the house, stop- ping to examine all the upper shelves in our closests. I found the 2 Gameboy box hastily tucked under some blankets, as if it were napping until the big reveal. My glee betrayed me and when my parents stepped through the door I ran to wrap my arms around their knees, surprising all three of us. I found the Gameboy! I said, and my parents looked at each other, before my mom replied, Well, I’ll just make sure your card contains all the surprise this year! Since we moved to America, every 1st of June my mom would cut a heart out of a manila folder and use whatever office supplies we had lying around to draw my current obsession—aquariums, the red candy flakes I sometimes ate as a snack, Clifford the big red dog—but more importantly, write “Happy Birthday Bao Bao! I love you.” By this time PBS Kids had taught me “I love you” was something American families said to each other, but I had lived more of my life Chinese, and my parents even more so, so I never asked them to say it. During those birthdays, after I was all pooped out from the sugar of the cake, I would sleep with the cards clutched against my chest, lapping up whatever explicit affirmations of love I could get. I had a hard time focusing in class that June 1st because I couldn’t stop thinking about the Gameboy. For once the card seemed secondary to the birthday gift. But when I came home, I found my mom crying at the kitchen table, a bunch of opened mail scattered across it. My father sat on the couch, his gaze like a statue’s. “Go to your room,” he said when he saw me. I froze in the hallway. “No,” said my mom, punctuating the silence. “Our child deserves to know. What do you have to say?” “Go to your room,” my father repeated. 3 My mom rubbed her eyes and took a shaky inhale. “Do you talk to Tanya’s children like that? When you treat them to Chez Maman when our own child eats microwave dinners?” “This has nothing to do with you,” my father said, I wasn’t sure whether to me or my mom. He grabbed me by the shoulders and my mom made no move like I thought she would, instead glaring knives at my father. He guided me to my room. “Be a good kid,” he said, adding before he closed the door, “happy birthday.” From my room I could still hear them arguing, though they switched to the Shanghainese dialect of Chinese so I could not understand what they were saying, only the rise and fall of my mother’s hysteria, my father’s trenchant responses. It made me sad that my mom was sad on my birthday. I wanted to go back there, tell them that I didn’t mind eating the Kid Cuisines, that I liked how the mac and cheese was shaped like penguins and the fake chocolate taste of the brownies. But the imprint of my father’s grasp was still fresh on my shoulders, and my doctor told me that I had to stop picking at the place where I scraped my knee, that I had to give the scar space to heal. So I did what I knew my parents both would have wanted, and started on my homework. When I heard the muffled start of the car engine (my father) and the hiccups steady from the kitchen table (my mother), I carefully squeaked open my door, carrying my chair back to the closet where my Gameboy still lay, waiting. We (the chair, the Gameboy, and I) all returned to my room where I read every page in the Gameboy’s instructional manual before turning it on. Late into the night, when the only sounds were my fingers against the buttons and the insects buzzing outside, I shut the Gameboy off, placed it next to my pillow and fell asleep, crying. 4 When I woke up the next day, it was to the smell of rice por- ridge—just like any other day. I didn’t bring up last night and neither did my parents. And so the days continued, though the birthday cards stopped. After acquiring some form of the American Dream, my parents hauled ass from rural New Hampshire to a wealthy, largely white suburb of Los Angeles, enrolling me in a high API high school before they had even signed the apartment lease. My first day there, I thought I had seen all my classmates before as extras in Hollywood films. As I waited for my mom to pick me up, I would watch the other parents pick up their children in shiny sports cars. Then, when the children turned sixteen, they would drive their own sports cars to school. Even though my parents and I never spoke of the subject, it was abundantly clear to me the sacrifices they had made so I could be here, here being just a stepping stone on the path to a prestigious university. They would have launched into space and grabbed a burning star with their bare hands if it meant I could go to MIT or Yale or Stanford in four years. They knew even less than I did. Having no college experiences in this country to draw from and no friends who spoke their language in our new neighborhood, my parents would scrounge the Chinese forums, bookmarking individual posts until the toolbar on the internet browser was overflowing with advice. And so I joined yearbook, because every Chinese- American kid played violin, just like me, and one extracurricular wasn’t enough—after all, we were spending all our waking hours being our best academic-and-more selves, while simultaneously trying to prove to the admissions committees that we were kids 5 with real feelings, kids who weren’t just our SAT scores, and that we only loaded our schedules with AP courses and volunteering and math olympiads because we had to excel two, three times as much as the white kids to be given an equal chance. I had read online the common factor between National Merit Semifinalists was that the whole family ate dinner together every night. Either this knowledge never made it to the Chinese forums or it was the only advice my parents chose not to religiously fol- low—seeing all four seats occupied at our dinner table was on the order of an extraterrestrial alignment. My mother was the constant, there because she made the food. After she called to come eat, my brother, who was in second grade, would complain that the rice or the dumplings or the lotus tasted bad—of course he knew this without trying it, he was tasting with his eyes. My mother and brother would have their daily scripted argument, which ended in him begrudgingly taking a plate of food to his room while he watched Minecraft videos. I pitied my mother so I would sit across from her and tersely answer her questions about my day—good, lots of homework. Around yearbook deadlines I wouldn’t be there at all. If we were lucky my father would come home twice a week, usually because, he said, his job mixing chemicals for drug test kits was pressed for a large shipment so he had to pull overtime. My mother and I both knew he was actually spending time with his friend Margaret, who showed up at our doorstep one day de- manding money. Whenever he didn’t come back for dinner, my mother would double bolt the doors and watch Chinese dramas until I went to sleep. Despite my best efforts, I was still the same person at fourteen as the one I was at seven. As a cross-continental transplant, I lacked the privilege of having friend groups carry over from middle school. 6 My classmates only spoke to me to ask for answers or to make fun of my outfits—to hide my fat arms, I always wore a brown velour jacket no matter the southern Californian sunshine, often with matching brown velour sweatpants, because my mom bought the set from JCPenny and not wearing them would be a betrayal of her love. A group of Mexican girls took pity on me and invited me to sit with them at lunch. They mostly talked about how third period math was, which I wasn’t in because I had skipped a year. While I ate I was silent, and after I finished eating I always thanked them for letting me sit with them and then moved to the library, where I played my Nintendo DS in between the mystery and romance bookshelves.
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